It's a Material World

Material Design 3 is the sophisticated underlying design scheme / language / science that underlies Google’s massive presence on the web. It deals with typefaces, colour schemes, icons, accessibility, navigation and more, and has a very large number of moving parts, including an interesting new colour model.

“Material is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design. Backed by open-source code, Material streamlines collaboration between designers and developers, and helps teams quickly build beautiful products.”

— Material website

The Tip of the Tip of the Tip of the Iceberg

An excellent explanation from the consistently great Veritasium channel examining the way algorithms shape content and vice versa. The sheer volume of posted YouTube videos requires algorithm settings that encourage sensational/clickbait content, and make it difficult for serious content providers to maintain their audience. Some of the principles at play here also show up in surfacing material on other algorithm driven services such as Amazon, Audible, Google and Facebook. A balanced and fascinating examination of a key online issue, presented by Canadian Australian Derek Muller.

Going, Going, Google...

Many of Google’s web services are extremely successful and useful (gmail, search, keep, etc) but many are in decline or have been shuttered permanently. This website keeps track of the current status and outlook for all of the major google services, including those who have long ago ascended to digital heaven.

Skills for the New Digital World

One of Google's many initiatives is Google Digital Garage, an entry point to many courses designed to assist people with skills necessary to negotiating the online world. According to the introductory material:

Grow your career or business at your own pace, with flexible and personalised training courses designed to build your confidence and help you thrive.

• Discover tools to make your business succeed
• Improve your interview skills
• Prepare for the career you want

Well worth a look for anyone wanting to enhance their digital skills, whether for business or other purposes.

Is Google's Material Design boring?

When a massive company like Google attempts to standardise the look and function of its many user interfaces (UI) with a single design 'language', it is naturally big news in the design world. Many welcomed the move away from drop shadows, fake wood grain and bevels etc, but others argue that the new look lacks personality, fails to advance the Google brand and is too uniform.

Noto — A Typeface for Every Language

Google has an endearing penchant for quixotic projects. Noto is that, but also a noble effort to construct a completely inclusive set of typefaces — covering all of the world's major scripts but also most of the minor ones. The name is derived from 'no tofu' — the little white squares that pop up when one attempts to type a character outside the character set of the font in question. The font itself is fairly vanilla, but highly readable and comes in four sans and four serif weights, and is free from Google. 

How to Help People Using Outmoded Browsers...

This nifty little Google-run service identifies the version of browser you are using and provides easy links for installing alternative browsers. Besides promoting Chrome, the site is designed to nudge people to towards installing modern browsers and to gradually chip away at the huge legacy population of people still using ancient versions of Internet Explorer.

Takeout Your Google Data

As the self-appointed organiser of the world's data, it makes sense that Google/Alphabet would have good data management tools for its users. And thankfully, it does, the form of Google Takeout. Anything users do on Google (photos, gmail, youtube, drive, fit, plus, etc) can be exported. Google's bots prepare your data and then email download links, or transfer the files to a linked service such as Dropbox. Download sizes can run into the multi-gigabytes. 

Primer Promotional Lessons from Google

As the biggest seller of advertising space in the world, Google knows a thing or two about marketing. They have distilled some of that knowledge into a series of lessons. Topics include "Create  a Landing Page that Lands Customers", "Segment Your Customers to Reach the Right Ones" and "Keep Customers Interested with Email Automation".

“We assembled a small team of our own marketers and challenged them to build a product they would use. The result is Primer.”

Get Friendly with Google Search

Make sure your website is ready for the little glowing screens by visiting this google-authored web page. Given that Google is now adding mobile-readiness to its search engine secret sauce, this is a big deal for businesses wanting to rank well in google search.